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    Tinkers: 10th Anniversary Edition
    Tinkers: 10th Anniversary Edition
    Tinkers: 10th Anniversary Edition
    Ebook176 pages3 hours

    Tinkers: 10th Anniversary Edition

    By Paul Harding and Marilynne Robinson

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Special edition of Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize–winning debut novel—featuring a new foreword by Marilynne Robinson and book club extras inside

    In this deluxe tenth anniversary edition, Marilynne Robinson introduces the beautiful novel Tinkers, which begins with an old man who lies dying. As time collapses into memory, he travels deep into his past, where he is reunited with his father and relives the wonder and pain of his impoverished New England youth. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, Tinkers is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature.

    The story behind this New York Times bestselling debut novel—the first independently published Pulitzer Prize winner since A Confederacy of Dunces received the award nearly thirty years before—is as extraordinary as the elegant prose within it. Inspired by his family’s history, Paul Harding began writing Tinkers when his rock band broke up. Following numerous rejections from large publishers, Harding was about to shelve the manuscript when Bellevue Literary Press offered a contract. After being accepted by BLP, but before it was even published, the novel developed a following among independent booksellers from coast to coast. Readers and critics soon fell in love, and it went on to receive the Pulitzer Prize, prompting the New York Times to declare the novel’s remarkable success “the most dramatic literary Cinderella story of recent memory.”

    That story is still being written as readers across the country continue to discover this modern classic, which has now sold over half a million copies, proving once again that great literature has a thriving and passionate audience.

    Paul Harding is the author of two novels about multiple generations of a New England family: Enon and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Tinkers. He teaches at Stony Brook Southampton.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBellevue Literary Press
    Release dateJan 1, 2019
    ISBN9781942658610
    Tinkers: 10th Anniversary Edition
    Author

    Paul Harding

    PAUL HARDING has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In 2010, he received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his debut novel, Tinkers. Harding lives in Georgetown, Massachusetts. Find him online at tinkerspulitzer.com.

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    Reviews for Tinkers

    3.5/5

    1,075 ratings146 reviews

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    • 2/5
      fiction (on audio). Narration was OK, I just had trouble following the story since the chapters/tracks were 100 minutes long so it doesn't work as well as a listen-until-you-fall-asleep kind of thing.
    • 3/5
      Decent story but a bit confusing at times.
      And then it just ends.
    • 4/5
      I think I might have read this book too fast. The prose is so beautiful it needs to be savored. These are the thoughts and remembrances of an old man dying. We travel with him into his past, alighting on moments of especial poignancy. A lyrical narrative with the pacing of a dream. This short novel is an ode to the fading beauty of life itself. Touching, sad, and ultimately comforting.
    • 1/5
      dull, tedious, depressing, 50 pages then gave up
    • 5/5
      Tinkers was a gift from my mother for my half birthday and, it turns out, a gift from Mr. Harding as well.The novel begins: “George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died.” While the story is told from the viewpoint of George on his deathbed, it weaves in and out of time, from the story of his epileptic father, whose seizures are proceeded by the feeling and taste of lightening, to George’s minister grandfather and through some of George’s childhood memories.I finished this book only an hour ago and immediately went to read reviews of it. I was surprised to see that, despite having won the 2010 Pulitzer, it had mostly mediocre reviews on Amazon. Most of the complaints were that ‘nothing every happened’ and ‘there was no plot’.Both are true, but that’s what made this story so beautiful. It wasn’t a story that felt crafted by an author, though the prose was lyrical and delicious. It wasn’t complicated. It wasn’t a story of what happens to people. It wasn’t even a story of who those people were. It was simply a story of what people choose to do with what’s given to them.George’s father was a small time door to door salesman, traveling via a horse and buggy. Much of the story was the recounting of things that once were fixed, that we are now quick to discard. Clocks, clothing, furniture… things that are now considered disposable that once were worth mending.Though, during the same time frame that we’re following George’s father helping to mend the broken possessions of his neighbors and customers, his father was himself thrown away. As he aged and his seizures became more violent and severe, the only thing to be done with him was to send him to a home for the criminally insane.I really don’t know how to put into words what I learned from this book or what I thought about it. For me, reading this book was an experience. It touched me more deeply than anything I’ve read in a long time. This is a book that deserves being re-read, and I have every intention of doing so.From a review by Elizabeth McCracken: “Paul Harding’s Tinkers is not just a novel – though it is a brilliant novel. It’s an instruction manual on how to look at nearly everything.”
    • 2/5
      I read this because Marilynne Robinson endorsed it, and because it's supposedly visual. It's not especially visual, unless late-Romantic descriptions of northern woods count as visual. The book is full of affecting vignettes about the lives of desperate people, but the stories are all clichés. A mountain man, who hardly speaks. A desperate tinker who has epilepsy. It's full-on Romantic, like Proulx without the bite, or Robinson without the sustained imagination. It is set in some vaguely defined timeless-seeming northern woods (stretching from 1820's to the 1970s, and from Maine to Pittsburgh, but effectively candlelit and horsedrawn). What does it mean that Harding, who so clearly desires to be in a place outside of time and culture, lives "near Boston with his wife and two sons"?
    • 2/5
      This was a difficult book for me to ever really get into. Had it been any longer I would have put outit down honestly. As others have said, it is far from a plot driven book. It's more of a meandering stroll through a few pretty yet disturbing passages of time. Not a favorite of mine nor one I would recommend to others.
    • 5/5
      It's hard to review a book with no plot exactly, but I can tell you this is one of the most rich and beautiful books I've read in a long time. Mr. Harding is a real writer - every subject he brings up is an opportunity for his prose to shine. This is a real gem. I particularly loved his descriptions of the various clocks and their inner workings. And everything about Howard was a delight to read.
    • 1/5
      Horrible! Many of the reviews gush about how this novel was passed over by the big publishers, but I can see why. This is not a diamond in the rough. It is an incomplete, boring, poor-man's Faulkner. This is the type of all style without any substance that too often origniates from UI. I almost never stop reading a novel (all the more so with something under 200 pages), but I had to quit after 120 pages or so. There was nothing to gain from reading this effort. With vast reworking, I am sure that Mr. Harding might have a story down in there somewhere, but this current addition isn't worth your time.
    • 3/5
      I liked the writing of this book of memories of 3 generation of men better than the content. The content of their lives was not that interesting, but Harding's descriptive writing often was.
    • 4/5
      Tinkers is a somewhat difficult book to describe. George Crosby is on his deathbed, and his mental capacities are quickly fading. The reader journeys into the lives of Crosby and his father with a patchwork of recollections and musings. Harding’s writing is superb. I love the way he describes the wonder of the natural world as well as the beauty, tenderness, and devastation of human existence. The book left me marveling at the complexity of life.

      This book is not for everyone. There is no linear plot line, a lot of random rambling, and some of the passages were a little confusing. I enjoyed the writing and the original style, but I can see why others wouldn’t. I also loved the size and shape of the book. It is really small and nice to hold.
    • 4/5
      Tremendously affecting at points, but swung between John Williams' mode and Marilynne Robinson. I don't like Robinson so much, but Williams is my favorite so it all worked out in the end. I can see why they gave it the Pulitzer.
    • 5/5
      Magnificent!! Beautiful mindwatering prose that creates the most touching imagery and metaphor that weaves the relationship of a father and son over two lifetimes....
    • 5/5
      Paul Harding writes a sensitive and prosaic account of the heart, the human condition, the irreducibility of life's circumstances and the ways in which we are all shaped. It is about much more than a man's, often humorous, memories of life during his last days or of his father's kindness and epileptic seizures which makes him a poor candidate for being a successful traveling salesman. Harding has a unique ability to delve into the gap that divides the material world from the mind's conception of it thereby exploring the mystery and the magic of being alive.
    • 5/5
      This book is exquisitely written and the themes of how our lives are intertwined with those of our ancestors and how the world operates as a clock with all the pieces working together (or not) are worth contemplating. I did not feel as moved, though, as I thought I should be in the face of such poetic prose and I cannot decide if the fault lies with me, or if the story lacks in substance somehow. Is the writing too self-conscious? Can there be such a thing?
    • 2/5
      The writing is wonderful. The descriptions are rich and often read like poetry. The details come alive with the gorgeous use of images and metaphors.
      The book tells stories in a series of flashbacks an eighty year old man is having on his deathbed. The stories are loosely bound together in that they all describe people and incidents from the main character's life.
      While the writing is wonderful and I have to admit to reading the entire book, I did not like it. Yes, it won the Pulitzer Prize and a lot of people loved it, or, at least, were impressed by it, but, personally, I am sorry I wasted good reading time on it. Had it added an interesting plot or good story to its marvelous writing, it would have been a great book. As it was, it was a lot like reading a diary or journal that had been edited and re-edited to read well.
    • 4/5
      Instead of a short book, this is really like one long prose poem - one to savour and read slowly. Some of the passages are beautiful and made me want to hold them in my memory or write them down somewhere. I enjoyed the interweaving of three generations into one story and the way in which the natural world; trees, forest and countryside, came through so strongly. I have to confess that at times I just had to let the words wash over me as I couldn't follow all the nuances and confusing angles. Well worth another read I think.
    • 2/5
      Hard to believe that this was a Pulitzer winning novel.
    • 4/5
      Beautifully written and enough plot to provide a suitable skeleton for the author to flesh out with his lovely prose. Harding won a Pulitzer Prize for this novel and it shows. Much of the book revolves radiates from the last three days of the main character's life as his memories radiate from his death bed.
    • 4/5
      I love the language of this book, but it was tough to get through the first ten times, mainly due to the time shifting and point of view shifting. In other works that have done this, the change in time or POV is announced through chaper titles or different voice, but this book mashed them together such that it's best read in one sitting.I read this short book in one sitting - on an overnight flight back from Germany - and it was a perfect way to do it.Enjoyed the writing and experience of reading, but there's not much action in this story.
    • 4/5
      A moving account of a dying man's reflections on his father and family. Something worked in the beautiful descriptions of clocks, parenting, seizures, seasons, nature, marriage, and local history. Favorite sentence, "It sank into the stand of breech trees beyond the back lot, lighting their tops, so that their bare arterial branches turned to a netting of black vessels around brains made of light." Gives me shivers to write it myself. The strong parallels across generations created some motivation for me to learner more about my own genealogy. Kind of sad that very little space is devoted to the dying George's current family members.
    • 4/5
      I must admit that I have mixed feelings about this book. I read it initially because of Marilynne Robinson's blurb on the back. When it won the Pulitzer I was very surprised. The language is beautiful--lyrical and sparkling. The stream-of-consciousness recollections were difficult to follow. I also found the style to be almost too similiar to Robinson's; I am sure the writer will find his own distinctive voice and I will definately read his next book.
    • 5/5
      A beautiful book -- prose poetry through and through.
    • 4/5
      This is such a beautifully written story. The deepness of the words and the emotion behind them make this a novel that truly touches the heart and the mind.
    • 5/5
      Please note: There are slight spoilers in this review.Tinkers begins with a man, George, lying on a hospital bed in his living room, surrounded by family. He is dying, and so his mind wanders through his life. The memories don’t come in order, but in snatches. They are mostly of his father, Howard, and somehow his father’s memories become George’s memories as well. I wouldn’t call this book an elegy, because even though it is about someone who is dying, it is neither melancholy nor mournful. On the contrary, it is celebratory — of the surprises of life, its mysteries, its beautiful moments.We experience this sense of celebration primarily through Howard’s memories, who is uniquely connected to the natural world. His sections often read more like poetry than prose. At one point, Howard remembers his own father, a minister. His father’s descent into dementia is recorded in Howard’s memory as a slow fade into nothingness, until he becomes a ghost. At one point, Howard goes looking for his father in the wood, believing that he has merged with the natural world. Howard imagines he will find his father’s bones at the cores of tree trunks, his teeth in stems of grass.George, by contrast, seeks to control the world rather than join with it. He never gives himself over to communion with the universe as his father does. Instead, he tries to impose order on it: by fixing clocks, by squirreling away money and other treasures in bank safety deposit boxes all over town. Probably this inclination stems from a pivotal time in his childhood, when his father first bit him on the hand during an epileptic fit on Christmas — until then, George didn’t even know Howard had epilepsy — then abandons his family because he learns that his wife is planning to commit him. It’s not until his own death that George perhaps glimpses the wondrous world his father inhabited.Tinkers is a short novel but should be a slow, close read. At times, the point of view or verb tense shifts without warning. I’m sure the author had specific reasons for doing this, and it wasn’t difficult to follow the shifts, but they were distracting to me. I also felt that some of the long passages extracted from a possibly fictional manual on clock repair were overlong and unnecessary. But most of the text is as finely wrought as a prose poem, and should be read that way, I think — carefully and in small chunks. I carried Tinkers around with me and read it at odd moments during the day. This seemed like the perfect approach. This novel is not a page turner. It is a great deal more.
    • 2/5
      I really wanted to like this book... it started off well, but then fell apart (much like the watches he tinkered with). At times, the writing is beautiful and the mini-stories engaging. But as a friend of mine described, it was "words, words, words, beautiful writing, words, words, words, engaging story, words, words, words, words, ..."Three generations of men, all with intermixed points of view, facing death. Great writing at times, but this wasn't enough to make a compelling or even readable story to me. Maybe if I read it 3 or 4 times I would "get it", but I can't imagine spending one more minute with this book. Don't understand why it was a Pulitzer!
    • 3/5
      I wasn't too impressed with this book. It doesn't seem like it was a story written to be read - more like a set of minimally-connected visions to be studied and analysed. I found the overall concept of the book to be interesting and worthwhile, but the detail of how Harding put it together didn't really hold my interest. I'm not American, though - maybe being part of the community he was describing (albeit in another time) might have given me a closer connection. Or maybe my problem was that a lot of the images and connections between generation were too subtle for me.Christian Rummel, the reader of my audiobook version, did a good job with difficult material.
    • 5/5
      This fine novel is ostensibly about the death of George Washington Crosby, an old man who lies dying of cancer in his living room while his family keeps watch. But the book isn't about George's death; that simply provides the framework for the real story, which is about his unsteady relationship with Howard, his father. While Paul Harding takes the reader into that theme through George's deathbed recollections (and possibly hallucinations) he develops it in a parallel narrative told from Howard's point of view. The story arc can be confusing, but it's clear when the reader pays attention. It's well worth the effort, too.Tinkers worked for me on many different levels. Harding immerses the reader into the dying man's stream of consciousness, a flow of thought/feeling/dreams that I suspect is very realistic. At times George is lucid, recalling notable incidents of triumph and tragedy from his life as clearly as a newspaper reporter. Often, though, he slips into prose poems that seem to have little bearing on the story but perfectly reflect the semi-dreaming state of his mind. Some readers may find these passages overwrought or superfluous; I thought they contribute to a greater understanding of the way a dying man's mind conducts itself.The strange workings of Howard's mind often intrude on the storyline, too. Despite these forays into sub- or semi-conscious thought, I found the characters well-defined, believeable, and sympathetic if not always totally likeable. In other words, George, Howard, and George's grandfather (who makes a cameo near the end) are just like real people. And, just like real fathers and sons, their relationship are very complicated, reminding me often of the paternal ties explored in my own short fiction collection, A Tale Of The Christ. The value of the novel lies in its ability to increase our understanding of ourselves.Tinkers may be a short book, but it is not a light read. Not because the subject matter is heavy, but because there are layers upon layers of meaning piled on the reader who takes the time to appreciate it. I plan to return to Tinkers again and again and expect to find at least one hard new truth every time I read it.
    • 3/5
      This is a somewhat odd little novel, about a father and son in Maine. The story focuses on two time periods about 70 years apart, the first when the son was just a child and later when he was dying as an old man. The story has a dreamlike and almost surreal quality, as some sections involve dreams of the characters or when one of them is dying and become delirious. There is great beauty in the descriptions of nature, but the story is relatively simple (life and dying) and perhaps escaping from some unhappiness.
    • 3/5
      A friend of mine claims to not like "plot-driven" books. He would probably love Tinkers because I'm fairly certain Tinkers falls under that category. I, on the other hand, love plot-driven books -- they give me reason finish books.Tinkers spans at least 3 generations of the Crosby family. Modern day George, who is dying during the entire book, George's father, Harold whose occupation was a tinker, and Harold's father, whose name escapes me, who was a Methodist minister.The book is beautiful written, poetic even, so much that I'm sure I missed much of the meaning of entire sections. Much of the book takes place in George's dying mind.While this book is not among my favorites, I think that many of the characters will haunt me for a long time.

    Book preview

    Tinkers - Paul Harding

    1

    GEORGE WASHINGTON CROSBY BEGAN TO hallucinate eight days before he died. From the rented hospital bed, placed in the middle of his own living room, he saw insects running in and out of imaginary cracks in the ceiling plaster. The panes in the windows, once snugly pointed and glazed, stood loose in their sashes. The next stiff breeze would topple them all and they would flop onto the heads of his family, who sat on the couch and the love seat and the kitchen chairs his wife had brought in to accommodate everyone. The torrent of panes would drive everyone from the room, his grandchildren in from Kansas and Atlanta and Seattle, his sister in from Florida, and he would be marooned on his bed in a moat of shattered glass. Pollen and sparrows, rain and the intrepid squirrels he had spent half of his life keeping out of the bird feeders would breach the house.

    He had built the house himself—poured the foundation, raised the frame, joined the pipes, run the wires, plastered the walls, and painted the rooms. Lightning struck once when he was in the open foundation, soldering the last joint of the hot-water tank. It threw him to the opposite wall. He got up and finished the joint. Cracks in his plaster did not stay cracks; clogged pipes got routed; peeling clapboard got scraped and slathered with a new coat of paint.

    Get some plaster, he said, propped up in the bed, which looked odd and institutional among the Persian rugs and Colonial furniture and dozens of antique clocks. Get some plaster. Jesus, some plaster and some wires and a couple of hooks. You’d be all set for about five bucks.

    Yes, Gramp, they said.

    Yes, Dad. A breeze blew through the open window behind him and cleared exhausted heads. Bocce balls clicked out on the lawn.

    Noon found him momentarily alone, while the family prepared lunch in the kitchen. The cracks in the ceiling widened into gaps. The locked wheels of his bed sank into new fault lines opening in the oak floor beneath the rug. At any moment, the floor was going to give. His useless stomach would jump in his chest as if he were on a ride at the Topsfield Fair and with a spine-snapping jolt he and the bed would land in the basement, on top of the crushed ruins of his workshop. George imagined what he would see, as if the collapse had, in fact, already happened: the living room ceiling, now two stories high, a ragged funnel of splintered floorboards, bent copper pipes, and electrical wires that looked like severed veins bordering the walls and pointing towards him in the center of all of that sudden ruin. Voices murmured out in the kitchen.

    George turned his head, hoping someone might be sitting just out of view, with a paper plate of potato salad and rolled slices of roast beef on her lap and a plastic cup of ginger ale in her hand. But the ruin persisted. He thought he called out, but the women’s voices in the kitchen and the men’s voices in the yard hummed uninterrupted. He lay on his heap of wreckage, looking up.

    The second floor fell on him, with its unfinished pine framing and dead-end plumbing (the capped pipes never joined to the sink and toilet he had once intended to install) and racks of old coats and boxes of forgotten board games and puzzles and broken toys and bags of family pictures—some so old they were exposed on tin plates—all of it came crashing down into the cellar, he unable to even raise a hand to protect his face.

    But he was nearly a ghost, almost made of nothing, and so the wood and metal and sheaves of brightly printed cardboard and paper (MOVE FORWARD SIX SPACES TO EASY STREET! Great-Grammy Noddin, shawled and stiff and frowning at the camera, absurd with her hat that looked like a sailor’s funeral mound, heaped with flowers and netting), which otherwise would have crushed his bones, dropped on him and fell away like movie props, he or they facsimiles of former, actual things.

    There he lay among the graduation photos and old wool jackets and rusted tools and newspaper clippings about his promotion to head of the mechanical-drawing department at the local high school, and then about his appointment as director of guidance, and then about his retirement and subsequent life as a trader and repairer of antique clocks. The mangled brass works of the clocks he had been repairing were strewn among the mess. He looked up three stories to the exposed support beams of the roof and the plump silver-backed batts of insulation that ran between them. One grandson or another (which?) had stapled the insulation into place years ago and now two or three lengths of it had come loose and lolled down like pink woolly tongues.

    The roof collapsed, sending down a fresh avalanche of wood and nails, tarpaper and shingles and insulation. There was the sky, filled with flat-topped clouds, cruising like a fleet of anvils across the blue. George had the watery, raw feeling of being outdoors when you are sick. The clouds halted, paused for an instant, and plummeted onto his head.

    The very blue of the sky followed, draining from the heights into that cluttered concrete socket. Next fell the stars, tinkling about him like the ornaments of heaven shaken loose. Finally, the black vastation itself came untacked and draped over the entire heap, covering George’s confused obliteration.

    Nearly seventy years before George died, his father, Howard Aaron Crosby, drove a wagon for his living. It was a wooden wagon. It was a chest of drawers mounted on two axles and wooden spoked wheels. There were dozens of drawers, each fitted with a recessed brass ring, pulled open with a hooked forefinger, that contained brushes and wood oil, tooth powder and nylon stockings, shaving soap and straight-edge razors. There were drawers with shoe shine and boot strings, broom handles and mop heads. There was a secret drawer where he kept four bottles of gin. Mostly, back roads were his route, dirt tracks that ran into the deep woods to hidden clearings where a log cabin sat among sawdust and tree stumps and a woman in a plain dress and hair pulled back so tight that she looked as if she were smiling (which she was not) stood in a crooked doorway with a cocked squirrel gun. Oh, it’s you, Howard. Well, I guess I need one of your tin buckets. In the summer, he sniffed heather and sang I’ll see you in my dreams and watched the monarch butterflies (butter fires, flutter flames; he imagined himself something of a poet) up from Mexico. Spring and fall were his most prosperous times, fall because the backwoods people stocked up for the winter (he piled goods from the cart onto blazing maple leaves), spring because they had been out of supplies often for weeks before the roads were passable for his first rounds. Then they came to the wagon like sleepwalkers: bright-eyed and ravenous. Sometimes he came out of the woods with orders for coffins—a child, a wife wrapped up in burlap and stiff in the woodshed.

    He tinkered. Tin pots, wrought iron. Solder melted and cupped in a clay dam. Quicksilver patchwork. Occasionally, a pot hammered back flat, the tinkle of tin sibilant, tiny beneath the lid of the boreal forest. Tinkerbird, coppersmith, but mostly a brush and mop drummer.

    George could dig and pour the concrete basement for a house. He could saw the lumber and nail the frame. He could wire the rooms and fit the plumbing. He could hang the drywall. He could lay the floors and shingle the roof. He could build the brick steps. He could point the windows and paint the sashes. But he could not throw a ball or walk a mile; he hated exercise, and once he took early retirement at sixty he never had his heart rate up again if he could help it, and even then only if it were to whack through some heavy brush to get to a good trout pool. Lack of exercise might have been the reason that, when he had his first radiation treatment for the cancer in his groin, his legs swelled up like two dead seals on a beach and then turned as hard as lumber. Before he was bedridden, he walked as if he were an amputee from a war that predated modern prosthetics; he tottered as if two hardwood legs hinged with iron pins were buckled to his waist. When his wife touched his legs at night in bed, through his pajamas, she thought of oak or maple and had to make herself think of something else in order not to imagine going down to his workshop in the basement and getting sandpaper and stain and sanding his legs and staining them with a brush, as if they belonged to a piece of furniture. Once, she snorted out loud, trying to stifle a laugh, when she thought, My husband, the table. She felt so bad afterward that she wept.

    The stubbornness of some of the country women with whom Howard came into contact on his daily rounds cultivated in him, he believed, or would have believed, had he ever consciously thought about the matter, an unshakable, reasoning patience. When the soap company discontinued its old detergent for a new formula and changed the design on the box the soap came in, Howard had to endure debates he would have quickly conceded, were his adversaries not paying customers.

    Where’s the soap?

    This is the soap.

    The box is different.

    Yes, they changed it.

    What was wrong with the old box?

    Nothing.

    Why’d they change it?

    Because the soap is better.

    The soap is different? Better.

    Nothing wrong with the old soap.

    Of course not, but this is better.

    Nothing wrong with the old soap, how can it be better?

    Well, it cleans better.

    Cleaned fine before.

    This cleans better—and faster.

    Well, I’ll just take a box of the normal soap.

    This is the normal soap now.

    I can’t get my normal soap?

    This is the normal soap; I guarantee it.

    Well, I don’t like to try a new soap.

    It’s not new.

    Just as you say, Mr. Crosby. Just as you say.

    Well, ma’am, I need another penny.

    Another penny? For what?

    The soap is a penny more, now that it’s better.

    I have to pay a penny more for different soap in a blue box? I’ll just take a box of my normal soap.

    George bought a broken clock at a tag sale. The owner gave him a reprint of an eighteenth-century repair manual for free. He began to poke around the guts of old clocks. As a machinist, he knew gear ratios, pistons and pinions, physics, the strength of materials. As a Yankee in North Shore horse country, he knew where the old money lay, dozing, dreaming of wool mills and slate quarries, ticker tape and foxhunts. He found that bankers paid well to keep their balky heirlooms telling time. He could replace the worn tooth on a strike wheel by hand. Lay the clock facedown. Unscrew the screws; maybe just pull them from the cedar or walnut case, the threads long since turned to wood dust dusted from mantels. Lift off the back of the clock like the lid of a treasure chest. Bring the long-armed jeweler’s lamp closer, to just over your shoulder. Examine the dark brass. See the pinions gummed up with dirt and oil. Look at the blue and green and purple ripples of metal hammered, bent, torched. Poke your finger into the clock; fiddle the escape wheel (every part perfectly named—escape: the end of the machine, the place where the energy leaks out, breaks free, beats time). Stick your nose closer; the metal smells tannic. Read the names etched onto the works: Ezra Bloxham–1794; Geo. E. Tiggs–1832; Thos. Flatchbart–1912. Lift the darkened works from the case. Lower them into ammonia. Lift them out, nose burning, eyes watering, and see them shine and star through your tears. File the teeth. Punch the bushings. Load the springs. Fix the clock. Add your name.

    Tinker, tinker. Tin, tin, tin. Tintinnabulation. There was the ring of pots and buckets. There was also the ring in Howard Crosby’s ears, a ring that began at a distance and came closer, until it sat in his ears, then burrowed into them. His head thrummed as if it were a clapper in a bell. Cold hopped onto the tips of his toes and rode on the ripples of the ringing throughout his body until his teeth clattered and his knees faltered and he had to hug himself to keep from unraveling. This was his aura, a cold halo of chemical electricity that encircled him immediately before he was struck by a full seizure. Howard had epilepsy. His wife, Kathleen, formerly Kathleen Black, of the Quebec Blacks but from a reduced and stern branch of the family, cleared aside chairs and tables and led him to the middle of the kitchen floor. She wrapped a stick of pine in a napkin for him to bite so he would not swallow or chew off his tongue. If the fit came fast, she crammed the bare stick between his teeth and he would wake to a mouthful of splintered wood and the taste of sap, his head feeling like a glass jar full of old keys and rusty screws.

    To reassemble the dismantled clock, the back plate of the works is laid upon a bed of soft cloth, preferably thick chamois folded many times. Each wheel and its arbor is inserted into its proper hole, beginning with the great wheel and its loose-fitting fusee, that grooved cone of wonder given to mankind by Mr. Da Vinci, and proceeding to the smallest, the teeth of one meshing with the gear collar of the next, and so on until the flywheel of the strike train and the escape wheel of the going train are fitted into their rightful places. Now, the horologist looks upon an open-faced, fairy-book contraption; gears lean to and fro like a lazy machine in a dream. The universe’s time cannot be marked thusly. Such a crooked and flimsy device could only keep the fantastic hours of unruly ghosts. The front plate of the works is taken in hand and fitted first onto the upfacing arbors of the main and strike springs, these being the largest and most easily fitted of the sundry parts. This accomplished, the horologist then lifts the rickety sandwich of loose guts to eye level, holding the works approximately together by squeezing the two plates, taking care to apply neither too much pressure (thus damaging the finer of the unaligned arbor ends) nor too little (thus causing the half-re-formed machine to disassemble itself back into its various constituent parts, which often flee to dusty and obscure nooks throughout the horologist’s workshop, causing much profaning and blasphemy). If, when the patient horologist has finished his attempt and the clock, when thumbed at the great wheel, does squeak and gibber rather than hum and whir with brass logic, this process must be reversed and tried again with calm reason until the imps of disorder are banished. Of clocks with only a going train, reanimating the machine is simple.

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